The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s recent report, “Understanding and Addressing Misinformation About Science,” landed at an awkward moment: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine crank, was going through Senate confirmation hearings to become the secretary of health and human services.

The report is written by a deep bench of experts who genuinely understand both the challenge and the stakes. National Academies reports have sought to provide “independent, objective analysis” to address complex problems and inform public policy decisions since 1863. Misinformation about science is one such problem, as challenges ranging from COVID-19 to climate change have made clear.

By the time my print copy arrived, Kennedy had been confirmed, the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement had the wheel, and misinformation about science was liberally flowing with the official imprimatur of the U.S. government. Except those producing the false and misleading information called it something else: “Gold standard science.”

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How should we think about what we’re dealing with here—and what lessons can be gleaned from a comprehensive and authoritative National Academies report that was written before this power shift occurred?

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The report foregrounds the idea of “communication inequalities”: Communities that are already disadvantaged often have less access to accurate, culturally relevant, translated science information and more exposure to lower-quality, less scientifically accurate content. On social media, content moderation efforts (which, since the report was released, have declined significantly!) are heavily English-centric. Misinformation about science is a universal vulnerability, but its harms fall hardest on those who already have worse health outcomes and good historical reasons to distrust institutions.

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The authors should be commended for wrangling a significant project and making a complex topic comprehensible.

But the report is calibrated for a world in which institutions such as the CDC and Health and Human Services are mostly part of the solution. We’re in the “raw milk renaissance” now, and those institutions have been retooled to broadcast anti-science narratives.

Indeed, by the definition the National Academies report offers, the U.S. government itself has become a prominent purveyor of “misinformation about science.”

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I’ve studied the anti-vaccine movement for over a decade—and organized against it (and RFK Jr.) in California in 2015, helping galvanize support for a legislative effort to strengthen public school vaccine requirements as a pro-vaccine mom. That experience left me convinced that a narrow focus on misinformation and factual claims misses what’s actually driving the movement: deep currents of identity and belonging, distrust of institutions, and the appeal of a story that names villains and offers community. You don’t solve that with better fact sheets.